The re-making of the English working class?

Abstract

Roundhead, Leveller, and Cavalier, Chartist and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, were not [Pavlovian] dogs; they did not salivate their creeds to economic stimuli; they loved and hated, a[gued, thought, and made moral choices. Economic changes impel changes in social relationships, in relations between real men and real women; and these are apprehended, felt, reveal themselves in feelings of injustice, frustration, aspirations for social change; all is fought out in human consciousness, including the moral consciousness. If this were not so, [people] would be -not dogs -but ants, adjusting their society to the upheavals in the terrain. But [people] make their own history: they are part agents, part victims: it is precisely the element of agency which distinguishes them from beasts, which is the human part.., and which is the business of our consciousness to increase.E. E Thompson ~In the quarter-century since the publication of Thompson's remarkable tome, The Making of the English Working Class, it and his subsequent works have informed the historical vision of a generation of social scientists in Britain and in the United States. These works have sparked political and academic controversy. Thompson and his confederates have wrestled with critics over the constitution of the early nineteenthcentury working class, the historical development of British class structure, and the theoretical problematic of culture versus structure. Much of these debates -sometimes heated and often downright scrappyhas been conducted within the confines of Marxist historiography and theory, although for Thompson, at least, such controversies are always as much a matter of practical politics as the stuff of academic roundtables.Thompson's achievements have come under renewed scrutiny recently through a new line of critique. Whereas the initial examination of The

Contentious Actions and Communication for Social Change: The Public Hearing (Jan Sunwai) as Process

“…The concept of the moral economy is an important supplement to our understanding of the motivating factors behind contentious actions because it highlights and affirms the close links between such actions and the normative frameworks shared by peasant communities (Edelman, ). While Thompson's examples of a moral economy in operation in 18th‐century Britain has been critiqued for its valorizations of contentious actions and for ignoring opportunistic and pragmatic behaviors (see Steinberg, ), it nevertheless provides an important corrective to our understandings of the collective behaviors and actions of marginalized communities who have rarely, if ever, been attributed moral agency and whose actions have been explained in terms of mob behavior, requiring interventions by law and order.…”

The contributions of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson to communication and social change theory and practice

“…Thompson’s work engages with agency, with experience as the basis for the making of agency, in the context of plebian cultures, based on the excavation of a great range of experiences that fed into the making of the English working class. As Steinberg (1991) has observed, ‘As an experientially grounded culture of resistance it was in fact born of this diversity and underlying commonalities’ (p. 177). In another important contribution, Thompson (1970) explains the ‘moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’ – a crowd that rioted during times of dearth, when bread was in short supply while the gentry indulged in a surfeit (p. 126).…”